NEK Forest Products Industry Shifts Focus To Regional Markets

Joel Currier owns a sawmill in Danville. Currier, who harvests trees from his own property as well as other forests, hopes to tap the emerging market for locally sourced wood products.

The Northeast Kingdom is the remotest part of Vermont, but it's also deeply
intertwined in the global economy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
forest products industry.

Many
sawmills are dark and the paper companies have left. Furniture manufacturing, once a reliable mainstay of employment, has been decimated because of
competition from overseas.

But
the region's dense forests still grow valuable trees. And efforts to revive the
forest-based economy are now focused on supplying wood for local and regional
markets.

Joel
Currier of Danville makes a living from the
woods. He watches as his electric-powered
band saw trimmed the edges off what had been an immense spruce log.

It's an exacting, almost
hand-crafted process to make the cuts accurate and to keep the beam straight
and true.

"This is another spruce
timber," he says. "I believe this is going to turn into an eight by nine that's
32 feet long."

Currier's mill in Danville produces a variety of wood products, from tamarack flooring
to red spruce boards destined for guitar tops. Today his mill is making beams
for a barn renovation.

"Most of the meat and
potatoes of what we do is long timbers," he says. "A lot of the covered bridges
in the state of Vermont actually have our timbers in them."

Currier's business is the
exception in the battered Northeast Kingdom forest economy. He's found a solid niche with his long
timbers and specialty woods, and he's reaching new markets with an on-line
presence.

But many sawmills and pulp
mills have folded in the face of high costs, decreased demand because of the
housing slump, and competition from overseas.

Currier pulls a well-worn
ball cap off his head that bears the logo of a mill that closed four years ago.

"Here's one here, Manosh,
that's no longer in business. It's pretty much been in the tank," he says. "There's
small, as I say, niche markets that are thriving. But in general it's not a
good picture."

Essex County Forester Matt
Langlais knows the picture all too well. While sawmills suffer and loggers
struggle to survive, the region still supplies high-quality saw logs to mills
across the border in Canada.

It's still a market for the wood.
But Langlais says the log exports mean the Northeast Kingdom doesn't benefit from any value-added manufacturing.

"It's difficult for people in
the Kingdom to see the trucks of our forest products rolling right past us into
Canada and seeing the lumber turned around and shipped right back to us," he
says.

The region has also exported jobs
as well as logs. Drive out Route 105 past the village of Island Pond and you'll see an empty shell of the Northeast Kingdom wood economy. Forester Jim Wood stops his truck next
to the shuttered plant.

"This is the Ethan Allen
furniture plant that was in Island Pond," he says. "Ethan Allen over time
basically has closed a number of their plants, and out-sourced and are making
that product elsewhere, not in the United States even."

Wood works for the Conservation
Fund, which owns 4,800 acres in Essex County. He and a group of other foresters want to bring more
money to landowners and loggers by focusing on what they hope is an emerging
market for local, sustainably harvested wood.

Wood opens a gate to a
logging road to isolated McConnell Pond, in the heart of the Conservation
Fund's holding. The black flies hover as Wood explains the idea is to show consumers that wood products are worth more
if the trees were harvested with care for the environment.

"And really being able to
tell the story where that came from," he says. "You know, right down to saying,
okay, this is the person that cut the tree, this is the woodlot it came from."

Their model is Copland
Furniture in Bradford which has launched two lines of furniture based on
the green-certified concept. The goal is to get everybody involved a piece of
the price premium.

"Your logging contractors,
your landowners, everybody would make some premium on that product. That, hey,
this is a quality product and should cost more in the marketplace," he says. "And
is there proof of that to work?
Certainly not. But we're going to try it anyway."

So the Vermont wood industry wants to for do for local forests what
the local food movement has done for agriculture. Call it building a Vermont brand based on the terroir of the trees.

Forest and Parks Commissioner Michael Snyder is enthusiastic
- but also realistic.

We meet for coffee at the Red
Hen Bakery and Café in Middlesex. It's a bustling place, and the bakery proudly
sells a line of bread made from wheat grown in the Champlain Valley. Snyder believes the same can be done for wood.

"We want to export it all
around the world. But we need to start here where we're meeting local needs
with local wood," he says. "And having people understand that just like with
food, it matters where your wood comes from."

The concept to certify wood
as local and environmentally friendly has been around for more than a decade. But
it hasn't yet brought the hoped-for revenue to loggers and landowners.

Snyder says in part there's a
classic chicken and egg problem. Consumers need to be aware that there's local,
certified wood out there. And businesses have to generate sales to justify
their investment.

"So we need people to demand
it more," he says.

Snyder says Vermont and the Northeast Kingdom can grow quality hardwood for furniture and other
value-added products. He says one first step to rejuvenating the industry is the
recently signed "working lands" act.

The law puts forestry on
equal footing with agriculture and makes wood-based entrepreneurs and
industries eligible for state assistance. That might include marketing, to get
the word out that local wood is good.

Tomorrow in part three of
Kingdom Comeback, we look at efforts to attract more manufacturing to the
Kingdom with the help of foreign investments.